Aaron Wormus blogs on PEAR Template trouble. The PEAR community seems to be having a significant debate over the proposal to include the template engine Savant into PEAR.
This proposal represents an identity crisis for PEAR. Joshua Eichorn recognizes the issue:
Either we have 1 engine and multiple api’s and fix mistakes of the past or we allow competition, this double standard just doesn’t cut it.
Lukas Smith recognizes the issue as well:
So in conclusion if we accept yet another template engine API into PEAR we might as well forget what PEAR currently stands for.
This proposal highlights the cognitive dissonance between the goal of having only one package for a purpose and the reality of already having multiple templating packages in PEAR.
Yet, there are many styles of templates representing different viewpoints and needs. Perhaps this is responsible for the amazing proliferation of template engines in PHP. Can PEAR hope to cover all of these needs with a one size fits all approach? (or even a 5 sizes fit all approach)
Alan Knowles added some Savant features to Flexy and defends fortress PEAR:
Flexy now does _everything_ that Savant does.. – you are basically proposing a competative package, that’s only competative feature, is realistically, that provide a marginally different API…
But Paul Jones, the author of Savant responds by vowing to press forward with the political process:
That is as it may be … however, I am going to continue the proposal and let it come to a vote.
I do not know what this means in terms of PEARs political process. If Savant wins its vote, does this mean that the doors to PEAR are open and that competition is allowed?
Will there be a grand unification of PEAR template engines? Or will the status quo be preserved, confirming the landgrab theory?
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PEAR is becoming PHP’s perpetual SOAP opera. It’s interesting that scraps like this seem to be fewer when it comes to PHP’s own APIs although there are areas of competing interests, such as handling i18n character sets.
Personally think Savant should be part of PEAR simply because it’s down to earth, well documented, mature and people will probably want to use it. Using the criteria identified on the Template View page it should be possible to identify which engines offer exactly the same “style”, which would be a point to eliminate one or other. Think PEAR’s going to need some kind of “depreciated / no longer supported” status.
PEAR people continually say “We don’t want to see PEAR turn into CPAN or PHPClasses.org”.
What PEAR has above those other repositories is GOOD standards and a Peer Review system. If the package meets technical standards there is no reason why it should not be included. Let the people decide what they want to use.
The reason we have more “soap operas” than PHP is that our development process is much more open with a much flatter hirarchy than PHP itself. Anyways it seems like the majority of pear-dev’s seemed to prefer a clean up rather than accepting that due to fairness a mistake must be repeated.
And why not follow the same approach as with all the other packages: have a PEAR_TEMPLATE class that can be configured to use either Savant, Flexy, Smarty, you name it. Yes that brings a performance issue, but if you want the best performance you shouldn’t even use templates.